Watching television has become a common activity for many people, allowing people to receive important information (e.g., news broadcasts, weather forecasts, etc.) as well as simply be entertained. While the quality of televisions on which programs are rendered has improved, so too have a wide variety of devices been developed and made commercially available that further enhance the television viewing experience. Examples of such devices include Internet appliances that allow viewers to “surf” the Internet while watching a television program, recording devices (either analog or digital) that allow a program to be recorded and viewed at a later time, etc.
Despite these advances and various devices, mechanisms for watching television programs are still limited to two general categories: (1) watching the program “live” as it is broadcast, or (2) recording the program for later viewing. Each of these mechanisms, however, limits viewers to watching their programs in the same manner as they were was broadcast (although possibly time-delayed).
Often times, however, people do not have sufficient time to watch the entirety of a recorded television program. By way of example, a sporting event such as a baseball game may take 2 or 2½ hours, but a viewer may only have ½ hour that he or she can spend watching the recorded game. Currently, the only way for the viewer to watch such a game is for the viewer to randomly select portions of the game to watch (e.g., using fast forward and/or rewind buttons), or alternatively use a “fast forward” option to play the video portion of the recorded game back at a higher speed than that at which it was recorded (although no audio can be heard). Such solutions, however, have significant drawbacks because it is extremely difficult for the viewer to know or identify which portions of the game are the most important for him or her to watch. For example, the baseball game may have only a handful of portions that are exciting, with the rest being uninteresting and not exciting.
The invention described below addresses these disadvantages, providing for annotating of programs for automatic summary generation.